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Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him
D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO City of Heroes/Villains:
"... he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain 'Syphris.' Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player. Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later. 'If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.' ... As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular. At first, players tried to beat him in the game to make him quit. Myers was too skilled to be run off, however. They then made him an outcast, a World Wide Web pariah that the creator of Syphris — along with hundreds of other faceless gamers — detested."
I'm guessing you're an MMO troll yourself with an attitude like that. A subtle but no less interesting point you may have missed here is that in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
God I hate gamers.
So, a researcher enters a foreign land.
Wrong. Learn to differentiate reality from fantasy.
He obeys the strict letter of the law, but ignores the customs and rules of polite behavior.
Polite behavior?? I haven't played this game, nor will i ever, but it seems like an appropriate guess to think that the goal of this game is to kill your enemy (or nemesis or whatever).
For further insight please read my previous post (but you probably won't, because you already know your are right). It's just a game, for f**k's sake. GET A LIFE!!
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
If you read some of the comments from posters who played the game, apparently he was kind of cheating. He was using a cheap trick to teleport opponents in front of NPC guards which did all the work for him, while he evaded attackers and teleported them into the NPC trap one at a time. The bots are there to create a "safe zone" for people who don't want to PVP. He abused it to kill people who didn't want to PVP from the other side.
Basically, he was doing the equivalent of "train to the guards" and claiming credit for the kills. Technically that's "within the rules" but definitely against the spirit of the game even as the developers set it up. What a biter.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Feel free to keep making it up as you go along. You have to be one of those players that takes the game scarily seriously that I see in WoW all the time, threatening other players online as though you could do anything about anything, and going all nerd-rage and moving onto personal threats within a short space of time. Reminds me of the time I accidentally trained a bunch of mobs onto another player on the same faction, and he told me to "do that again and watch what happens". When the game completely removed the ability to affect players on the same side in any meaningful way. Maybe he was going to cast water walking on me as I took a huge dive into water or something.
You can't freely be a 'badass' in the game? Because of what? That it's going to be "added to your reputation"? You seriously think that people are going to be changing servers and character names because of a bunch of tweens or early twenty-somethings call them a faggot or a n00b enough? You do realise that there is a ceiling on the IQ level allowed to access/read MMO forums, and let me tell you, you'll get enough change out of a hundred to fund at least a handful of YouTube commentators.
But I digress.
If the game developer (self righteous? ouch, someone bitching about the latest nerf are they?) didn't prevent something, then it's within the rules. Just in case you weren't aware, that's actually how the rules in a game are defined, because it's a closed system and there are no external influences. The developer is king. If they let you do something, do it. If they don't want it done, they block it. If something is happening that makes you all teary eyed, then go dampen the shoulder of the internal game admins, and I'm sure that if the developers want it stopped, it will be stopped. Otherwise, hey, it's just a game. For some of us. In the mean time feel free to parade around like some sort of king of shit mountain, as though you have the power to really do anything, because your self delusion is pretty damn entertaining to read.
[Side note : I have an 80, 76, 71 and 70 in WoW, this isn't a "You're a loser because you play WoW" comment. It's just that there is a reason I play on a PvP server; it's so your own side can be easily blocked as well as having no way of talking to the other side. Because basically, as a rule, the vast majority of MMO gamers are socially, and likely mentally, retarded, and take the game seriously to a quite frankly pathetic level. Case in point, our man unity100 here]
There is a lot of early morning aggro here, not least because I can't drink coffee at the moment, but I'll post anyway.
So, since he was on the opposite team, he should let you kill him every now and then to keep things even? He should let you go about, peacefully attacking other people on his team? He should leave a geographic location where he holds an almost invincible edge over his enemies just so he can have the accepting nod of an enemy?
Buck up. He beat you at the game. He lured you in and beat you. You have nothing to legitimately complain about, because if you were smart, you would have done it to him or his team. If you have a heightened sense of nonsensical honor in the fairytale world of makebelieve, then you have the option to simply avoid him and let the dishonorable curr fling his verbal assaults. They don't hurt you -- or perhaps you don't enter a world area where KILLING YOU BY ANY MEANS NECCESSARY is the purpose of 50% of the population and then be surprised that someone came up with a way to kill you with minimal effort. If you want a game where this isn't possible, there are plenty available.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Also, "being irritating" in this case involved playing the game the way it was meant to be played. He wasn't doing things that were merely "technically" allowed. He wanted to roleplay as a hero, so he attacked villains.
The summary headline is inaccurate and inflammatory; its author needs to go back to Fark.
what he did is exactly "things that were merely technically allowed" he used insta-kill npcs to grieve. the article suggests he was skilled to no end and able to somehow beat everyone because of his uberness, he wasn't, you actually can't be in any mmorpg to my knowledge. if people want to kill you, they will and he was killed many many times, he just continued to use borderline mechanics to annoy other people, he didn't even profit from doing so. how the fuck did that comment get modded up, seriously...
Umm no. It's a game of heros vs villains. He was playing heros vs villains. It makes total sense, and the OOC factors you keep bringing up like they mean something are just that - OOC. Utterly meaningless here.
And I get the feeling trying to explain this to you will be something like trying to explain the colour blue to someone who was blind from birth. :(
You are playing a database. Hence your fixation on points, and repeatedly raising the fact that the game 'didnt reward' what he was doing. In an RPG you dont take actions to curry rewards, at least not primarily. You take actions because of IC motivations. Your character knows nothing about points or score!
And bottom line, if you are playing the game you should be playing it because you enjoy it.
If you dont like the game, ffs find another game instead of ruining it for the people that are actually playing it and enjoying it. Which is clearly what the majority of COH players have done - taken over a game they didnt like and ruined it for anyone that actually want to play.
Oh well, after reading TFA I am greatful to the author for the warning - it's a game I might have otherwise wasted time on.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No, you fucking child. That's for bullying intended to inflict emotional scars. Simply randomly insulting someone merely shows them not everyone in the world is a Disney character. There's nothing in that which, if it caused lasting harm, is the fault of the unsavory person.
Now to call your mom a worthless person, incapable of doing anything right, and continue doing so day after day while also keeping her from leaving. That's where that law you mentioned comes in.
Honestly, I can't believe you fucking imbeciles who want to water our world down so that you'll never have to face the ugly truth of your own failure. Laws are for real harm, asshole, over-prescribing them is as harmful as with antibiotics.
No shitbird, because you suggested the law as a remedy for someone's hypothetical mother who'd been called a cunt. That would be the watering down, and it's your reflex to deny it that makes you an asshole.
You've got paranoid tendencies if you see people disagreeing with you as trolling.
That's exactly what the law says. That's not watering anything down, that's the law.
Sigh, yes. That is a law.
But when you suggest it as a remedy for a trivial insult you're watering it down, along with the suffering of those it's meant to protect such as the little girl hounded to suicide.
You might question whether calling your mother a cunt is "extreme and outrageous"
No, I know that it is not, you festering retard, as does everyone with a mental age over seven. It's ridiculous that a few unfriendly words from someone you don't even know could be so extreme as to cause a normal person severe distress.
I don't see people disagreeing with me as trolling, I'm all for civil discourse. What you're doing is not very civil.
Bullshit, Fucknut. If I was uncivil I'd be kicking down your door and punctuating this with violence, or threatening to do so. I am merely sharing my view of someone who could utter such ill-considered drivel.
But that's my point, you'd rather be offended by my words than simply address the content. The law isn't (/shouldn't be) another censorship tool for whiners who are afraid of being shown to be wrong, or upset that they aren't being respected properly.
Pshaw, if I were a true unix stereotype I wouldn't be caught dead walking.
I see your distinction, but it seems weak, and thus retroactive. That law is not for people who got called a cunt any more than a assault is 'for' people who were barely touched. You can cry rape for anything but it's meant to punish people who seriously harm another person not to punish someone for being uglier than you expected when you sober up, even though it gets used that way.
That is not a correct statement, there is such a law, which I've pointed out, which sometimes gets broadly applied by certain people to do just that - remedy a trivial insult.
But not really, as I'm saying.
This is semantic, I'll grant you, but it's obscuring the issue.
I can imagine plenty of sympathetic juries who would consider "aggressive" use of the word "cunt" as being "extreme".
Yes, but the law is one thing, not anything you could imagine a jury buying. Many juries would consider a riding-crop in someone's ass to be obscene, but that doesn't mean it is, or that if a law were bent to prohibit filming it that the law would be constitutional.
it is widely considered uncivil to go around addressing people the way you are
And god (a god, take your pick) is widely believed to exist.
It doesn't surprise me that I have to point this out to you
Oh, so you got this far and thought I didn't know?
my sensibilities are not so easily offended as to cause me emotional distress
I see. So you went to my site browsing for material, got insulting, and acted all pompous and holier-than-thou just for the hell of it?
It's not offensive to me when someone insults me for a perceived reason which isn't actually true (i.e., ignorance).
No, it is offensive, but it isn't harmful.
But that's my point, you cretin, that there's no harm from all those things I said to you. I'm just some guy on the internet who knows nothing about you, so nothing I say can harm you if you're sane. That's sort of the definition of adulthood.
You just seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I'm a type of person that I'm actually not, and enjoy insulting me because of that.
No, if I enjoyed harassing you today it's because of how funny you are when you try to be all proper while being insulting.
Back to that semantic thing though... If you consider that an overzealous policeman could cite you for anything, and there'd be a closest law to it however tenuous the connection, then you could say that there's a law for everything. Cough in public? Ummm, disturbing the peace, engaging in biochemical terrorism, etc...
Or, if you would agree that laws can be over-broadly applied it implies that not all uses of the law are reasonable or valid, they're just random crap that happens to be wrongly prosecuted under this law as opposed to another.
So while I'll agree the law exists, I don't think it, or laws in general, mean quite what you think. Everything not explicitly forbidden is allowed. You seem to be operating on the anything-possibly-questionable-is-forbidden model. Are you in North Korea?
There's a law against killing someone, but not against calling them a cunt.